World of Warcraft Wealth Survey 2012

I'd like to thank everyone who took the time to fill out the survey, this project would not be possible without help from the World of Warcraft community!

Here's the tl;dr version:

Average player gold was 302,593

Median player gold was 80,000

81.63% of players survey reported bloew average gold levels

"The 99%" owns 74.18% of the gold

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Hello everyone,

Some of you might remember last year I ran a World of Warcraft Wealth Survey which turned out to be successful that I decided to do it again this year. This year not only will the survey be gauging player wealth but it will provide the second data point to start tracking inflation hopefully.

The survey is completely anonymous, not even your IP will be tracked, so you can feel safe answering all the questions as honestly as possible (there are some questions about botting that might normally give people pause). I ask everyone who takes the survey to answer as truthfully as possible, nothing is to be gained by lying about anything on the survey.

This is pretty meaningless, I'd say 2/3 of my wealth is in inventory, which you aren't counting. Most people I know who are relatively wealth would likely say the same surely.

Originally Posted by Shamanic

I've completed it, although as above, whilst I have a lot of gold, I have a LOT more value in investments in banks full of inventory stock but I just put down my actual gold figure.

Originally Posted by umppa

i think there should be what is yuor inventory value too, as i have only like 16k now but have stacked up almost 1mil woerth of stuff that im gonna sell in few weeks

I realize this is a flaw in the survey but I decided last year to do it this way for 2 main reasons
1.) For the more casuals, and even more dedicated players, accounting for inventory is a tricky business. Just asking for raw gold values greatly simplifies the process and gets better results since it's clearly defined what I want
2.) What something is worth does you no good unless you can sell it, I'm trying to target how much gold people actually have. Even when you sell it it has to come out of someone else's pockets you know? Minor point to the above reason but still a good one

I realize this is a flaw in the survey but I decided last year to do it this way for 2 main reasons
1.) For the more casuals, and even more dedicated players, accounting for inventory is a tricky business. Just asking for raw gold values greatly simplifies the process and gets better results since it's clearly defined what I want
2.) What something is worth does you no good unless you can sell it, I'm trying to target how much gold people actually have. Even when you sell it it has to come out of someone else's pockets you know? Minor point to the above reason but still a good one

Fair enough, but from my perspective I tend keep around about the same liquid and then always be using and/or storing the rest, hence my response is basically the same as it was in Cata, which is going to hurt accuracy in terms of tracking inflation and so on. I probably increased my wealth 5 fold in Cata, but that's not really reflect in my answer compared to last time and so on.